The Million Lives Campaign

AT least 5 million people worldwide die from injuries each year. Two
professors in Seattle have declared a global campaign to prevent 20 percent of
those deaths, saying it is "within our grasp" to save about 1 million lives
annually. Drs. Fred Rivara and Charles Mock of the Harborview Injury Prevention
and Research Center (part of the University of Washington) published their
proposal in a December 2005 guest editorial in the journal Injury
Prevention.

Their model was the "100,000 Lives" campaign of the Institute for Healthcare
Improvement, which asked 2,000 U.S. hospitals to reduce deaths with six
strategies, including rapid response teams to prevent cardiorespiratory arrests.
Rivara, MD, MPH, said in a Feb. 8 interview that the six interventions
recommended in their "1,000,000 lives campaign" are proven and already working
in many settings.

"1,000,000 lives campaign" Interventions

Strategy

Lives lost, 2000

Possible reduction

Lives saved

Improving trauma care

5,000,000

8 %

400,000

Preventing road traffic injuries

1,200,000

25 %

300,000

Treating depression to prevent suicide

817,000

20 %

160,000

Eliminating child labor deaths

57,000

100 %

57,000

Reducing deaths from intimate partner violence

50,000

50 %

25,000

Reducing child drowning deaths

116,000

50 %

58,000

Total

1,000,000

Chart credit: HIPRC/INJURY
PREVENTION

Rivara said he and Mock, who is HIPRC's director, did not rank the six
interventions according to the ease of accomplishing them. "I don't know that
these are ranked here except in order of lives that would be saved," he said. Better trauma care
around the world clearly would save many lives, he said, and the U.S. system of
protective orders does reduce intimate partner violence. He said this is an
opportune time for preventing road traffic/pedestrian deaths, as countries such
as China industrialize and realize they can learn from mistakes and successes
industrial nations have made. "In many ways, it's a chance to start over and try
to do it right," Rivara said.

He said they hope to see progress on some or all of these six items a decade
from now. "Much research for injury prevention has been done. The task right
now: Let's use what we know and apply it to save lives," Rivara (fpr@u.washington.edu) said to explain why
they had announced the campaign now and had called for colleagues to move beyond
research and limited intervention trials to the larger world of public
policy.

"It's clearly somewhat of a dream here," Rivara told me. "But it's a dream
that might be possible if people think about it and decide to do it."

This column appears in the May 2006 issue of Occupational Health &
Safety.

This article originally appeared in the May 2006 issue of Occupational Health & Safety.